Why has a specific morbid matter a specific bacterium, specific in size, shape, behavior and mode of life? Why is not the bacterium of a tuberculous sputum the same as that of gonorrhoeal pus? Why is it seen that the more numerous the bacteria in a subject, the more violently is he diseased? Hahnemann was a true scientist, and he saw all round the ball; Kent was a metaphysist and he saw one side of it to deduce generalisations therefrom.
10) The deductions of Kent have gone further, and some followers have advanced so far as to pronounce all diseases as the children of the mind. Their argument is that, as disease is due to susceptibility due to psora, and as latent psora affects the mind and morbidly deranges it, so all diseases– itch, syphilis, gonorrhoea, cholera and small-pox–are born of the mind of the patient himself. Therefore, behave properly, lead a moral, spiritual life and be free from disease. But morality and spirituality are relative terms; their connotations vary with varying environments and nationality. Are not the saints also affected with disease, and do they not die of it? If disease is born of mind and not of external agents, Hahnemann’s conception of the infective character of miasms becomes null and void.1.
11) You may call it idle to discuss the problem of the causative factor of disease. We are aware that, save and except the “exciting” “fundamental” and “maintaining” causes in acute and chronic cases, (Organon, 6th, Sec. 5), we need not consider any other causative factor before the preparation of the anamnesis. In fact, the totality of symptoms is our sole guide. But research is the only approved sacrifice at the altar of Truth. Dissuade the world from all thinking and research, and the whole civilised society becomes a zoological garden in a decade.
If Hahnemann refrained from theorizing the Organon and the Chronic Diseases–the highest monuments to medical philosophy the world ever saw–would never have seen the light. The bacterium may not be our target in the clinic, but it is a deadly enemy in society. Hahnemann says: “He (Physician) is likewise a preserver of health, if he knows the things that derange health and cause disease” (Organon, Sec. 4.). The physician is to advise people in matters of hygienic means to prevent disease, in the same manner as he is to select his remedy on the totality of symptoms, in order to induce the vital principle to arouse its defense mechanism, to produce antibodies, and effect or enhance automatic eliminations and thus achieve a cure.
12) This metaphysical approach of Dr. Kent and others is responsible for overlooking many salient points of Homoeopathy. The most prominent of them is the question of dose. Hahnemann strictly differentiated dose from potency, quantity from quality, and clearly enjoined the administration of one or two globules of the size of the poppy seed as the adult dose. But the metaphysician says: “(Let) large and small, as to the dose, be dismissed from the thoughts of the prescriber. . . .
Large and small can hardly be predicated of that which is wholly dynamic,” (Wells, Intermittent Fevers, page 92, Ind. ed.), as if the dynamis had no mathematics because there is not the matter, as you can not count it. Why, our present mathematics may fail, a new mathematics may be invented to cope with the problem, and measure the infinitely divided atoms or ions.
Dynamic or static, every thing has its own volume, pressure and velocity, hence its penetrating or shock-giving power. From the merest atom to the mightiest star, every thing has in it a magnetism, an electricity or radio-activity which is now or will be in future measurable by a new standard of mathematics. Does not the shock-giving power of a spiritlike dynamic electric current vary with the increase or decrease of voltage, ohms and wants? Is not an electric current within our measurable capacity?
SUBHAS ROAD: BERHAMPORE, POST-KHAGRA.
DT. MURSHIDABAD, WEST BENGAL (INDIA).
